For most mass-marketers, regional comprises not more than 30 per cent of their total ad spends.Shephali Bhatt | ET Bureau | Updated: March 02, 2016, 09:04 IST

"I remember one meeting with Rohit Bansal, co-founder of Snapdeal, where we converted the BBC news website from English to Urdu to see what it looked like," recalls Anand Chandrasekaran, ex-Airtel senior executive, currently working as Snapdeal's chief product officer.

They couldn't understand anything on the converted version, obviously. The exercise made them realise that this is what Snapdeal looked like to someone who doesn't understand English - which is roughly 90% of Indian population.

"If we thought adopting to ecommerce initially was difficult for people like you and me, imagine their plight," he says.

To remedy that, Snapdeal recently launched seven regional language versions of its app and will announce four others soon. It's not the only one to have this brainwave. Several consumer-tech players seem to have hopped on the vernacular jet ski.

- Quikr is now available in seven Indian languages. In fact, all vernacular versions show ads in the same language instead of English (not just those posted by users but third party ads as well).

- Olacabs will soon have its drivers' app in several regional languages.

Early days to talk RoI?

There are more mobiles in our country than you know what! And with increased penetration, the chatter around going regional is becoming more insistent. There's data to prove India consumes $90 billion worth of content in local languages. But does the benefit of going regional justify the cost?

If we consider consumer tech companies, yes, there is no conclusive evidence of RoI from going regional, says Arvind Pani, cofounder and director of Reverie Language Tech — a startup that offers local language solutions for the internet.

But a quarter of businesses Pani has provided the service to, have seen a 15% surge in traffic within the first three months. And 40%-50% of the existing users have shifted from English to vernacular versions. He has worked with the likes of Quikr and Ola, HDFC Securities and Hungama.

It's just been two months since Quikr went vernacular so none of the local languages have replaced English as such. "But single digit adoption rate is also healthy," says Vineet Sehgal, CMO of the online classifieds platform. While there's higher regional language content consumption on media like print, TV, and radio; it's still early days for regional consumption on the internet.

But the size of the market (see Regional Scoreboard ) and the business opportunities it can bring along, makes the investment worth it. "We are not waiting for it to become a rule. Regional languages for our interface is a matter of hygiene for us now," he says.

Snapdeal, too, has not seen a crazy spike in overall traffic ever since the vernacular launch. But there's been a steady growth, we hear. "70% of our order volume comes from non-tier-1 markets. The 'change language' option allows us to speak to 2/3rd of our customers today," says Chandrasekaran.

Apparently, Snapdeal has been getting several requests on social media from users across the country to introduce their language on the app as well. It just shows there's pent-up demand, waiting to be served.

The one player to have tasted success by going regional is Dailyhunt (erstwhile Newshunt). What started in 2009 as a multilingual news aggregator has fetched over 90 million app installs.

When we asked Vishal Anand, Dailyhunt's chief product officer, about the break-up of users, he told us that English accounts for only 5% of the page view volume. 35% goes to Hindi. So, the rest (60%) is for vernacular languages excluding Hindi.

No wonder they expanded to verticals like shopping of multi-lingual books, and test preparation. "Over 100 million aspirants take civil services exams every year. That's the size of market we're aiming at now," he says.

Why traditional brands #fail @Regional

For most mass-marketers, regional comprises not more than 30% of their total ad spends — so effectively 1/3rd of the total budget for 2/3rd of the market and vice-versa. Standalone regional campaigns are few and far between.

That explains why Reverie's Pani gets 80% of his business from consumer internet players and only 20% from traditional large enterprises. Let's not even do a product-to-product comparison with consumer internet players because that would mean expecting traditional brands to go multi-lingual on their packaging to start with.

"But why can they not do that," asks Shubhajit Sen, ex FMCG guy, current CMO of Micromax, whose 'Unite' range of multiple-language-friendly devices is the single largest selling range in the entire portfolio.

While consumer-tech is moving closer to regional, FMCG is moving away from it, he feels. It's becoming more global in its outlook and approach. Perhaps that's an organisational cultural issue, he reckons.

What these brands need to remind themselves is that 'understanding' and 'connecting' are very different things.

While a large set of consumers may understand English or even Hindi, they'll most likely connect better with your message if it's in their first language.

Some brands don't realise the magnitude of the problem because the people at the helm are literate and not every player indulges in epiphanous exercises like Snapdeal did.

Not to mention, it's clearly ten times more time-and-money consuming for FMCG guys than it is for the techies. But the scope of business regional holds for them doesn't leave much of a choice, does it?

Some brands are trying to comply

Vodafone allocates equal budget for both national and regional campaigns. Interestingly, it does 7-8 national campaigns but over 30 regional campaigns in a year.

Even Pani feels more and more traditional large enterprises (mostly in Banking and Telecom right now) acknowledge the need to go regional in their interaction with consumers as and when they see successful case studies in their category.

But it's still 'very' early days. A section of the market has just woken up from the deep slumber of 'English is an aspirational language' to 'English is just not enough'. It'll be a while before the wisdom spreads its wings.

What will take flight in no time — Language tech startups that'll enable other startups and traditional players to go multi-lingual. Don't be surprised if they become the B2B space's next big thing. And when they do, remember where you heard it first.